Why I Let My Students Use AI

It’s back-to-school season, and one subject is top of mind: artificial intelligence. AI’s capabilities are expanding daily, transforming education and raising profound questions: Does it help or hurt students? What about teachers? And how can we use the technology productively—if that’s even possible?

Few people have a better vantage point on this debate than teachers. So we reached out to two of them to explore it from both sides: the case to ban AI in the classroom, and the case to embrace it.

Read on to hear from Rod Naquin, a high-school English teacher from Louisiana, who believes teachers who refuse to integrate AI productively into their classrooms are missing a massive opportunity to change the educational landscape for the better. And click here for the opposing perspective from Deb Eaton, a high school English teacher from Philadelphia, who prohibits AI in all her classes—and believes other teachers should too. —The Editors

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last four years, you’ve encountered the debate about AI in education. You’ve seen headlines from researchers who claim that using a chatbot is akin to outsourcing your mind to a machine. You’ve heard warnings about cognitive off-loading, cognitive debt, cognitive decline. A few weeks back, I read a commentator describe AI use as “cognitive cancer.” You’ve heard the hand-wringing about how students no longer do their homework (they used to?), no longer write their own essays (they were good at this?), and no longer read their assigned texts (haven’t they been using SparkNotes for years?).

If I were living under that rock, and I peered out at this discourse, I might just climb back down and take my chances with the grubs.

The problem is, the naysayers have it all wrong. I am a high school English teacher in Louisiana, and I’m here to tell you that while the concerns about the effects of AI on students’ learning are real, to a point, they are also dramatically overstated.